ABOUT THIS ALBUM

Album Notes

Federico Valdez Perea. Irradiaciones

A particular universe

I do celebrate this Irradiaciones record release featuring collected works of composer Federico Valdez.

He is a colleague and friend of mine from Argentinian origins with a well established carreer in musical creation, and teaching in severe musical institutions in Argentina as well. He arrived at Mexico and entered UNAM´s Escuela Nacional de Música in order to further extend his studies and so achieving a Master´s degree. He has continued his work as a composer and also being a regular author in multidisciplinary projects with a particular aim in performing arts, while making experimental music his territory.

Federico´s music features an earthbound quality, concrete... He skillfully builds listening scenarios achieving diverse levels of abstraction in his discourse, proposing complex textures of timbre as levels of sound depths for the listener. Austere in the use of technological resources and selective of his materials, he succesfully combines acoustical instruments, the human voice and diverse objects patiently recorded.

He is successful in building the formal structures upholding the development of each one of his proposals in this recording, his pieces induce us to a particular universe and refer us to a certain evocation of dreams, the feeling of our own inner voices, or the images of some ancient rite.

Antonio RussekCuernavaca, Morelos, May 2017

A journey

Creators working with sound are permanently exposed to the discovery of unique features of their work material. Utilizing frequencies has become, due to the new technologies, something akin to the manipulation of a clay-like sound material that allows you to work in unimmaginable ways.

The technology available to us today is part of the discovery process, tools are on themselves material when the work is submitted to a permanent reflection and recontextualization. When a piece moves -gradually or drastically- between the concrete and the abstract as a sound environment and doesn´t respect the post-war canons, then we find ourselves under a more refreshing and interesting perspective.

The pieces in this recording are kind of a bridge between a music aiming to be performed, concert-hall music, identifiable, unified and a sound environment that doesn´t require necessarily time in order to function, closer to Sound Art, and less attached to the way music is usually conceived.

Federico develops vocal processes that exist into structures that are not aimed to be narrative but instead inspiring. The pieces compiled in Irradiaciones are the reflex of a composer of our time, that brings to sound his personal experiences, cultural mix and baggages, but also with the clear interest of mantaining his proposal connected with the audiences. He cares for the public. His proposal is sensitive to what the new technologies have to offer in order to work the sound material in itself as an almost plastic element, and Federico travels between the inherent meanings of a timbre and his semantics and the digital timbres spectrally controlled.

This journey is on itself the creative proposal, it is this journey the one giving structure to musical and sonic ideas. It is a recording that can be listened to in any order. It can be observed or listened to. To observe because it give us reasons to think and ponder about our own ideas and ways of understanding music. It can also be listened to, because if we forget our reasons and prejudices we´ll experiment in a surprising way the very moment of the sonic event. For me these pieces are an uncontrollably journey between the intuitive and the rational, without any doubt a very enjoyable journey indeed.Rodrigo SigalApril, 2017

Coreografía acústica para solista (2014)This work was conceived and realized as a radio piece, a becoming of sounds ubicated between the concrete and the abstract stemming from evocation, innuendo and dream. Upon a few initial sound recordings an aesthetic micro-universe appealing to imagination is elaborated. The notion of an acoustical choreography is metaphoric but also real, by the means of articulate on itself as such into the electro-acoustical space-time and in function to a particular dramaturgy, in which, sounds are material and actors of motion. The idea is the proposition of a journey through the listening of a piece binding together elements from radiophonic art, and electroacoustical music. With the exception of the piano, all the sound recordings are taken from voice registers.Voice: Talía Falconi. Modified piano: Federico Valdez.

Canción zapatista (2010)This piece has been realized from the use of some timbrical, micro-tonal, attack, and articulation possibilities of the Andinian quena, and that are inherent characteristics of its sound universe and which results vary notably in function of the specific differences of craftmanship on each instrument. Much closer to a música sucia (dirty music) -in which ancient Andinian cultures resound, and Poema sucio de Ferreira Gullar- than to the tonic sounds with a clear and tuned fundamental tone characteristics of Central European culture, the pitches of the piece are conceived as a wide airy and oscillating band of frequencies weaving a chant for Emiliano Zapata, framed into the faint political reality in the country 100 years after the Mexican revolution.

vo’vé (2009)An attempt to approach through sound -in the paradigmatic duration of a radio broadcasted pop song- a psychic and existential thematic related to alienation, confinement, and impossibility. From the notion of acoustical footprint a migration process of the verb and the sound detonates around the phrase como si salir fuera posible... that becomes embodied in a knit of voices and instruments with varying degrees of processing, generating sort of a puzzle of verbal and sound meanings with multiple trajectories, that can be -or not- rebuilded and multiplied by each listener, but that in turn it is no more important than the full sound weave in itself.Piano and voice: Frania Mayorquín. Flutes and voice: Wilfrido Terrazas. Voice: Federico Valdez.

Episodios del jaguar (2016/2017)This work is part from a series of pieces realized with n`vike and electroacoustics. The n`vike is a bowed one string musical instrument from Pre-Columbian-Mestizo origins, and patrimony of the Qom people, natives of Argentinian Chaco. Its features of rustic manufacture and complete craftmanship work, and also its unique sound qualities -above all its timbrical and gestural richness- that I have found quite attuned to my sensibility, have constituted a strong motivation to re-contextualize it into the frame of a personal and contemporary sound poethics, aiming to establish a bond betwen the ancient Mestizo practices and resonances with the current ones, in function of achieving a synergy field between an initial acoustical current stream of powerful characteristics and the new technologies.

Cuál flor… (2010)The sound construction of the piece is freely inspired in the architecture of labyrinths, from that, that the different materials appear, disappear, get re discovered and transformed, giving the result a certain hallucinatory dye or -if preferable- of a distorted reverie. It is about a subtle and ironic process of disassembling that plays around with the misogynist stereotypes that extoll a certain image of women in the popular imaginary, a phenomenon that occurs often when the portrait of an other with one`s own vision byased is attempted, and that in turn is culturally builded. The piece was composed for the choreographic piece Puro Ayayay! by Talía Falconi, and marks the beginning of a colaboration that still continues.

Bailo-pienso (2009)The piece emerges from imagining how it would sound renaissance polyphony in a context in which instead of melodic modes we would have bands of filtered noise as source of pitch material, inquiring in the perceptual paradox that that situation might provoke. And in turn, this idea is projected in the temporary dimension, which oscillates permanently between two strata: one of fixed durations and another of fluctuating durations. Both engaging in a contrapuntal relation intertwined with what it is occuring in the realm of the frequency bands. The aim is to generate a structure that disappears allowing to emerge the fluidity and plasticity of sound-noise.

Aguas revueltas (Homenaje a Silvestre Revueltas) (2009, rev. 2017). From the timbrical possibilities and the playing techniques that offers a relatively small and rustic instrument such as the fiddles that are builded by certain popular craftsmen and that are sold in Mexico City streets, the gestural and textural characteristics of sound are explored under the perspective of a geological excavation technique with the microphone, which in here is also considered a musical instrument, fully integrated to the sound tradition from more than a century ago and that performs in this case as an essential mean to make perceptible -as if it were an stethoscope- the sound layers that in other instances would be inaudible, and that here are presented modelled highlighting a strongly dramatic character (if that can be said in the context of sound), and inspired in the figure of Silvestre Revueltas.

corite-mapaihnu (irradiación 0.2) (2007/2008) The idea of working over some indigenous languages of Mexico has been impulsed by a double fold fascination: to inquire the music from words and their interstices (that alludes to the word as sound material but also as a propositional entity of musical meaning), in which the act of listening erects as a motor and fundamental tool of the creative process; and, from other part, the setting of culturally rooted concepts (life, death, time, space, music) that are enunciated and verbally designated -because they are understandable- in different manners in each one of these cultures. The result is something sort of an intercultural encounter that it is aesthetically constituted in the sound composition stemming from the voice, the word and listening. All the materials in the piece come from recordings of conversations with eight female creators from different ancient cultures of Mexican territory.Voices: Juana Inés Reza, Martha Toledo, Clorinda Palma, Felicitas Durán, Leonarda Contreras, Ana Dolores Vega, Loida Armenta and María de Jesús López.Work realized with the support from Programa de Maestría y Doctorado en Música de la UNAM and Centro Mexicano para la Música y las Artes Sonoras (CMMAS). Awarded at Séptima Bienal Internacional de Radio, México, 2008.

Federico Valdez (Federea)His work includes music, sound art, scenic arts, sound poetry and interdisciplinary work in the realms of creation, performance, improvisation, research and pedagogy. He creates instrumental/vocal music, electroacoustic music and for mixed media, that is presented in diverse international forums. He also participates as composer, performer and improviser in contemporary and experimental music concerts. He also realizes musical shows, sound poetry and video in solo fromat, and also solo piano improvised concerts. He composes original music for scenic arts and audiovisual pieces and also engaging as a performer in dance works, theater works and interdisciplinary proposals. He also has done residences of creation and concerts in several institutions in Mexico and Latin America. His formation includes studies on piano, guitar, conducting, combined arts, architecture, sound and audio-visual media. He obtained the degree Licenciatura en Composición in Universidad Nacional de La Plata (UNLP), Argentina -in which he also imparted as a teacher for several years- and Maestría en Música in Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).